[Gllug] OT: Warning - new WD portable drives!

[James Courtier-Dutton]

On 10 June 2011 10:00, j.roberts <j.roberts at stabilys.com> wrote:
> On 10/06/2011 06:22, general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>>
>> On 09/06/11 02:29, Alistair Mann wrote:
>>>
>>> general_email at technicalbloke.com wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  Hi all,
>>>>
>>>>  Just a quick warning that you might want to avoid Western Digital's
>>>>  latest USB3/2.5" portable hard drives.
>>>
>>> <snip>
>>>
>>>>  I'm sure this move makes sense to WD for reasons of speed, space and
>>>>  cost but personally I wouldn't touch one of these drives with a
>>>>  bardgepole so I figured I'd best warn you guys in case you'd feel the
>>>>  same way.
>>>
>>> Caddies in general seem to fail much more often than one would expect,
>
> <snip>
>
>> I have heard portable drives are one of the manufacturers main outlets
>> for "recertified" drives...
>
> Aargh! Any sources?
>
>> For this reason I have always been a
>> bit dubious of the pre-made ones, preferring to make my own.
>
> We also see a MUCH higher failure rate for pre-built USB caddies (even RAID
> ones) than for bare drives.
>
> We do not see this for ones we make up ourselves, though doing this is not
> strictly speaking economically sound :) We do not however keep detailed
> statistics for these few drives.
>
> Of course one must also say that USB caddies are much more likely to be
> dropped, knocked or power cycled whilst turned on than are drives in a main
> computer case, and many caddies seem to have no, or very little,
> ventilation.
>
> Mind you, that would also apply to the caddies we make up, and they don't
> have the higher failure rate.
>
> I would NEVER trust important data to a non-RAID1 USB caddy, and I'm wary
>  even then, as I have had over the years various cases of near-simultaneous
> RAID drive failures... RAID5/6 caddies are not available :)
>

I find all external caddy type systems prone to failure. Mainly due to
lack of cooling present.
I have resorted to off site backups at my home.
I place a server at my parents house and one server at my home.
I backup everything onto my server at my home and then use rsync over
ssh, in trickle mode to transfer all the data to my parents house
server. For example, a HD video from my camcorder might take a week to
rsync to my parents house, but it gets there in the end.
I just wait for the rsync to complete before I erase the SDHC card
from the camcorder.
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